Paint

This is a two-fer.  Not only am I in love with paint, I am also in love with the names of paint.  I will confess that there have been times when, confronted with several choices of paint colors, I have gone with the one whose name I like the best.  I also confess that I would love to have a job naming paint colors.  Seriously.  Who names paint colors and how much do they get paid to do so?  Do they make more than schoolteachers?

Imagine in one day's work coming up with names like "Daybreak's First Blush" or "Rosewood Cottage" or "April Thicket."  How about "Sea Breath" or "Rain Dance" or "Seafoam Storm"?  I bet you can even visualize those colors based on their names.  So let me challenge you:  can you imagine "Dewdrop" or "Loyalty" or "Gentle Wind"?  (If you imagined those three as shades of blue, you win.)  But what color is "Stillness"?  How about "Encounter"?  Or "Cincinnatian Hotel Abbey"?

Recently, I needed to choose an off-white color that would bring to mind sandy beaches.  I gathered several color cards from my local big box emporiums.  I studied the subtle differences between the choices, but the names kept throwing me off.  How could I choose between "Gull" and "Sandpiper" and "Navajo Sand" and "White Lagoon"?  They all conjure the sandy color I was searching for.  (Oddly enough, I ended up with "Drumskin," which is a whole different mindset.)

Ah, but color is only part of my love of paint!  Today I used a Rustoleum "Gloss Almond" to paint the baseboard heat registers in my house.  Never underestimate the power of GLOSS!  My registers are positively glowing almond!  Consequently, everything looks new and joyous and ready for many more years of abuse.  I feel resurrected.

Paint lets you start over.  Paint hides all your flaws.  Paint convinces you that it is never too late to reinvent yourself.  Not happy with who you are?  Here, try "Sparkling Lake" or "Moon Sail" or "Elegant Lace."  There are so many possibilities; surely you will find your color.

Today I fell in love with paint.

Magic

I have always been in love with magic.  There's just so much of it to love.  And just when I think I know all of magic's secrets, there's more magic to distract me!  Today had a good dose of magic in it, and I am still awestruck.

When I was very young, my sister had a little pink record player.  It could only play 45s, as I remember, and she had a few of them.  My favorite was Ricky Nelson's "Lonesome Town."  I would listen to it over and over when my sister wasn't around, but it wasn't just the song or Ricky's voice that put a spell on me.  It was the record player.  A small mesh screen at the base of the machine seemed to be the place from which the music emerged, and I stared at the tiny lights that flickered inside.  It was surely magic that shrunk Ricky Nelson to a size so small that he could fit inside that little room and sing to me.

A couple of years later, I was the proud owner of a transistor radio.  It was much smaller than the record player, a chunky little rectangle housed in a brown leather case, maybe 4" x 6".  During the day, I could listen to Cousin Brucie and the Top 40 hits, but very late at night, I could hear Chicago!  No, not the band, the CITY of Chicago!  That magic little radio could pull in a signal from a world away!  I liked to take the radio out of its case, pry open the back, and stare at those little transistors, color-coded in some secret configuration of magic.

And as I grew older, the magic continued.  I was the proud owner of a stereo hi-fi with a drop-down turntable, a very large Panasonic 8-track player/recorder, several small cassette boomboxes, and eventually, a massive stereo system with speakers that could double as end tables.  And then, as steadily as all of this equipment had grown larger and larger, it began to get smaller and smaller, until thousands and thousands of record albums could be contained in one tiny little iPod.  Magic?  No doubt about it.

On a whim today, I moved my nearly twenty-year-old Bose Acoustic Wave Sound System to another part of the house and enclosed its rather dated visage into a corner cabinet.  I also found and attached to it a rather serpentine flexible antenna with tentacles and threaded them upward toward the ceiling.  Pushed the power button and . . . you guessed it:  MAGIC!  Incredible sound is filling up my house, my afternoon, and my heart! 

I'm smart enough that I could probably find a book on the electronic reproduction of sound and perhaps get a general understanding of how these little boxes can fill my home with music, but I think I will continue to credit magic.  Magic is just so much easier to love than wires and transformers.

USPS

I am in love with the United States Post Office. This is a bigger deal than you think, because I very nearly broke off all communication with the USPS fairly recently. I mean, I was angry, vengeful, unforgiving. It all began last fall, when I paid $16.20 to send a Herman Hesse paperback book to my daughter in Australia. She needed this particular book for her masters thesis. Had I known it was an out-of-print book, selling on eBay for $50, I might have insured it. But I didn't. I trusted in the USPS. And why shouldn't I? “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” right? I grew up believing in that motto. And I can easily conjure up the snowy blizzards of my childhood when Doc, our mailman, never failed to deliver. So I sent the book off to my daughter, confident that it would arrive at its destination.

It didn't. After a month of asking my daughter online every day, “Did the book arrive yet?” I went to my local P.O., receipt in hand, to request a tracking of the book. It was then that I noticed something on the receipt: “Aruba – First-Class Pkg.” ARUBA? What? The print-out from the Postmaster confirmed it: “Destination: ARUBA.” Fearing dementia, I checked the receipt from my Customs Declaration. Yes, clearly, I sent the book to Australia, not Aruba.

But the USPS was clearly looking to end our relationship. I wanted my money back. No way, they said. Track the package, I demanded. Can't track it once it leaves the country, they retorted. “Is it in Aruba?” I queried. “Oh, no, it wouldn't have gone to Aruba!” the USPS insisted.

Liars.

I have a record of the phone calls I have made to the USPS. I have dates, names, case numbers, all of it. I was told, on my last phone call, that it would take up to 23 days before I would get a response. (Twenty-three days? How in the world do they predict that?)

Well, the distraction of the holidays, travel, and small family crises took my attention away from the USPS. My daughter, too, was traveling all over that crazy land down under. She returned to her home base this week and messaged me, “Oh! The book arrived! 'Missent to Aruba' it says on the package!” Okay, so FOUR MONTHS LATER, it found its way to the address I'd printed on the package. Never mind that my daughter finished her masters thesis without it. The USPS delivered.

And today, I received in the mail:

• from India, a book sent from a friend
  
  
• from HongKong, a connector that will allow me to display my MacBook Air programs on my TV
  
  
• from my financial advisor, a check to cover my son's college room and board
  
  
• from a magazine publishing company, an amazing offer to get two years for the price of one plus a free bookmark plus a garden planting guide plus a cookbook plus a long term care policy . . . all for only $9.95!
  

Clearly, the USPS wants me back. And I'm easy. I love the USPS.

Stinkbug

This morning, I fell in love with a stink bug. Right before I killed her.

It was not a premeditated murder. It was an accident, really. I'd first met her last night while I was laboring over a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle on my dining room table. She was fluttering ecstatically around the chandelier overhead, occasionally alighting on one of the opaque globes for a rest. She must have been exhausted, fooled by the warmth of my house into thinking that winter was over and it was time to emerge. I tried several times to lure her onto a piece of paper so that I could release her, unmolested, outside. But she was crazed with the warmth and the light and would not sit still. I finally gave up, figuring she would either die of stress or crawl back into whatever crevice she'd been sleeping in. I worked on the puzzle a while longer and eventually went to bed.

I was moving the dirty dishes out of the sink this morning to prepare to wash them. Scraps of last night's dinner swirled around in the eddying water, finally settling in the mesh drain. It is my habit to remove the drain and knock the contents into the garbage, and I was about to do that when I noticed movement. A closer look revealed that what I thought was a rusted piece of lettuce was actually my stinkbug friend from last night. Dumping her into the garbage seemed like the wrong way to go, so I set about trying to capture her in yet another effort to release her outside. Well, one thing led to another – it's not a pretty story – and before long my femme fatale was swirling around the drain, fighting with everything she had to resist the gravitational pull of the drainpipe. What could I do?

This is what I did. I reached for the nearest utensil, a knife, and I pushed her armored body down into the wet darkness. I am not proud of this.

The brown marmorated stinkbug (Halyomorpha halys) protects itself from predators by emitting an odor due to trans-2-decenal and trans-2-octenal. In other words, it stinks up the place. Up to this point, I'd been successful in never harming a stink bug into releasing this odor. In fact, I didn't even know what it smelled like. I was about to find out. Some have described the smell as “a pungent odor that smells like cilantro.” Now, cilantro is one of my two favorite herbs, and the scent sends me south of the border to culinary heaven. While the expiration of my little stink bug did not leave me craving guacamole and chips, she did manage to perfume the kitchen with something pungent.

And that's when I fell in love. What spirit! What brass! What revenge! In her last moments, she gave it all she had, met her destiny head-on, got the last word in. And that word --- “stink” – hung around for the rest of the morning, reminding me of the hand I had in this small murder. I remain humbled by her determination and hopelessly, irrevocably, in love with her karma.

Tracks

Today I fell in love with the animal tracks in the snow on my property. Every morning, I trek down to the road to retrieve my two newspapers, one from its appropriate box and the other from the driveway, wherever it may have landed. There was a fresh coat of unadulterated snow on the driveway, so it was easy to spot the evidence of nighttime animal activity. My own cat refuses to go outside in winter, so I could not ascribe any of the tracks to her. It is certainly possible that my neighbors' dogs might have carved their presence into the landscape, searching, in love and despair, for my Golden Retriever whom I had to put down a month ago. But there are so many other possibilities to explain the crisscross zigzag trails across the lawn and pavement.

I am well aware that time and temperature can alter the markings in the snow. What might have been the gentle impressions left by a fox or a deer can easily become evidence of a grizzly bear or timber wolf or (OMG!) dinosaur after expansion and remelting have taken place. So I study the prints on my way to the newspapers, trying to ascertain what creature was visiting my realm while I slept. I suppose I could procure a book of animal trackings and make a scientific assessment of the animals that may have left their mark, but I think part of falling in love is trusting in imagination and possibility. In that spirit, I choose to conjure unicorns and satyrs and perhaps an occasional dodo bird, because why not? The landscape comes alive with fur and fangs and ridiculous wing-flapping, and I am joyful in the throes of fantasy. Savoring this escape from responsibility and reality, I trudge back up the driveway, each step taking me closer to denial of the fantastic, until I find myself sitting at my table, newsprint spread out before me, slapped into a world free of dinosaurs, but lacking in imagination. Tomorrow morning, I will revisit the world of possibility, marked by bear claws and coyote scat and perhaps the tender markings of rabbits in love.

Washing Dishes

This morning, I fell in love with washing the dishes. Since my dishwasher broke several months ago and fixing it is complicated by the fact that I would have to rip up the tile floor to pull it out, I wash my dishes by hand every morning. So I was thinking about this Billy-Collins-falling-in-love thing, and I realized that I was in love with this simple task. In the house I grew up in, my mother never had a dishwasher. She also never let me wash the dishes. She said she enjoyed doing it herself. And she would stand at the kitchen sink every evening after dinner, silently washing the dishes and placing them almost lovingly in the drying rack. Looking back, I suppose this was the quietest part of her day.

But I wanted to wash the dishes! Peggy and Joanne, my best friends next door, got to wash the dishes every night. In the summer, I would go over there after dinner (to the house that I spent more time in than my own) and they would let me help. Peg was in charge of washing, and she would always squeeze the dish-soap bottle so that tiny soapy bubbles would erupt into the air for our amusement. And she would sing crazy songs while she did this, songs like “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” or “Monster Mash.” After the dishes were done, we trekked outside to "burn the papers." There was a big old rusted oil drum in the backyard into which all paper trash would go, and we got to play with fire as the evening darkened. Every night.

Peggy and Joanne had CHORES. I didn't have any chores. I wanted chores.

Many years later, when my mother sold her house and moved into a senior apartment, she had a dishwasher. She used it to store her pots and pans. She continued to wash her dishes by hand, but we began to notice that they were never clean. I guess she was going through those age-old motions but not really paying attention. Who knows where her mind was traveling?

I am mindful of all these things when I wash my own dishes. I think of Peggy almost every time. And I pay close attention to whether or not my dishes are clean, as if that will stop me from a future relationship with Alzheimers.

Today, I fell in love with washing the dishes.

Whom to Blame

It was a bitterly cold late-January morning.  I was teetering on the edge of Winter Depression, a place I am prone to visit when I cannot be outside in the garden.  New Year's Day was long gone with no resolutions in place.  And I didn't seem to care too much, having come to the conclusion that those promises we make to ourselves are simply lame attempts to have some control over our sorry lives.  As if we could.

It is with this dark attitude that I checked my email.  I found one from Matthew, who truly does not email too often.  Given that Matthew is one of my favorite people, I opened the email with a possibly lighter heart.  And this is what he had to say:

Here is a poem. I heard it on NPR this week driving into the city read by Billy Collins in an interview on the Leonard Lopate show. I was driving slowly in traffic underneath the giant raised highways at the George Washington Bridge merge in the Bronx.  I fell in love with an old brick tenement apartment building perched on a cliff and he read this poem on the air.

Okay.  I'll buy.

I probably read the poem five times that morning.  It kept drawing me back.  It was more than a poem; it was a missive.  It was trying to tell me something.  And I got it.  The result is this blog.  With great love to Matthew and to Billy Collins, I will end this introduction (and begin this blog) with the poem.  Just try not to like it.

Aimless Love

This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
I fell in love with a wren
and later in the day with a mouse
the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

In the shadows of an autumn evening,
I fell for a seamstress
still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
and later for a bowl of broth,
steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

This is the best kind of love, I thought,
without recompense, without gifts,
or unkind words, without suspicion,
or silence on the telephone.

The love of the chestnut,
the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.

No lust, no slam of the door –
the love of the miniature orange tree,
the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,
the highway that cuts across Florida.

No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor –
just a twinge every now and then

for the wren who had built her nest
on a low branch overhanging the water
and for the dead mouse,
still dressed in its light brown suit.

But my heart is always propped up
in a field on its tripod,
ready for the next arrow.

After I carried the mouse by the tail
to a pile of leaves in the woods,
I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
gazing down affectionately at the soap,

so patient and soluble,
so at home in its pale green soap dish.
I could feel myself falling again
as I felt its turning in my wet hands
and caught the scent of lavender and stone.

 - Billy Collins